As I stand in the window this Thanksgiving morning and watch the sky change minute by minute, tears slide down my cheeks. Missing my mother. Imagining her standing in this very spot through the years of her seasonal depression watching this same sky, while I was emotionally and physically far away. I know it lifted her spirits.

When I arrived back on the scene in 2012, her vision was gradually fading. I tried to describe the sunrise to her, hoping the thousands of photographs she took of it would flood her memory. But she could only say, “I can’t see it,” not understanding how to “see” it differently. I hope she sees it now.

I don’t have clarity about my grief. Do I miss her presence, or did I start missing that long before she died? And which am I grieving now? Or is it my distance from her for so many years that I grieve and regret? I stand here seeing the sun rise through her eyes. I stand here watching the sunrise through my eyes on her behalf.

Thank you, Universe. Thank you, One Who Is More. Thank you, Mama.

…i who have died am alive again today,and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birthday of life and love and wings and of the gaygreat happening illimitably earth…

Her obsession, and it could only be called that, with writing about her mother’s life both flummoxed and exasperated my sisters and me. For the 30 years—nearly to the day—between my grandmother’s death and my mother’s, my mother wrote pages and pages of notes and stories. The jottings I’ve found repeat the same facts, or my mother’s memory of the facts, on typing paper, in spiral notebooks large and small, in stationery pads with paper intact or torn out. When she could no longer see to write, she recorded the story, starting over from the beginning then repeating stories the next time she picked it up.

“Why?” I asked, like a broken record, telling her I wished she would write her own story.

“I didn’t appreciate what a hard life she had,” she would say. “She was so courageous her whole life. I didn’t understand how hard it was to be old, and I was so impatient with her in her last years. I promised her I would write about her life.”

I often wondered if that promise was made before or after the death my mother was not present for, a way to assuage her guilt that she hadn’t been by her mother’s side then or every moment of her last ten years. Like some “if only” promise to God that she spent the next three decades trying to fulfill.

Now, as I read about writing legacy in preparation to guide a group of women in doing just that, I have a new interpretation of my mother’s consuming passion. My mother was in the “legacy phase” of her own life, the time we take stock of where we have been, how our lives have been formed and informed, and how we hope to be remembered. I think my mother thought she was doing that on behalf of her mother, but what if—unbeknownst and unacknowledged—she was really writing her own legacy story?

My grandmother’s life story has been part of the family’s oral history for as long as I can remember, both from my mother’s and my grandmother’s telling. While I am happy to have the written version (or will once the transcription of the tapes is completed by my sister and edited by me), I may never have my mother’s own legacy writing. To be honest, I don’t know what is on the remainder of the tapes; friends worked with her on the project because I didn’t have the patience. Though I’m doubtful, maybe she did get to her own deepest self. Secrets yet to be revealed.

My sister and I got some of the story done and gave it to our mother for Christmas, four months before her death.

But as I read about writing legacy, I’ve come to understand that part of its purpose can be to heal a relationship, often in the absence of the other party. Is that what my mother was doing? Was she trying to understand her mother in order to better understand herself? Did she achieve what she was yearning for?

I don’t think she could have understood that’s what she was doing, and now I can’t ask her. Perhaps in the death of a loved one with whom we may have our own healing to do, we can make these things up. I can forgive the consumption of her time and her anger with me in wanting her to tell a different story, if what she was doing was reconciling her own life so that she might let it go.

I have wishes of my own. I wish I’d had this glimmer of insight so that I might have talked with her about it. I also know thinking such a conversation might have happened is my own magical thinking. Her fixation did not have any space for reframing; her personality did not allow for talking about herself; she was not in touch with her emotional self. Now it’s to me to reconcile my own relationship with my mother; to figure out how I want to frame my own legacy writing; and to break this mother/daughter cycle with my own daughter of not talking about what matters, things that will be hard to talk about. It sobers me to realize that, having no daughters herself, ours is the last chance to do it different for at least a generation.

Legacy writing—so that I might better understand my own story and what matters to me—is a beginning.

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I am a Pacific Northwest native transplanted to the southeast for 36 years. In 2012, I returned to my childhood home to live and care for my then 96-year-old mother. I am a writer, a hiker, and a back roads wanderer.